


watch me fly across the sea, count the ways you made me

by frostings



Category: X-Men (Movies), X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-30
Updated: 2014-12-30
Packaged: 2018-03-04 09:16:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3062324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frostings/pseuds/frostings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>pre x-men first class/days of future past. it starts and ends with loneliness</p>
            </blockquote>





	watch me fly across the sea, count the ways you made me

_“For Beatrice, when we first met,_

_I was lonely, and you were pretty.  
Now I am pretty lonely.”_

_\- Lemony Snicket_

She’s ten years old and Raven realizes that Charles doesn’t have all the answers.

Sharon Xavier takes one look at Raven teetering precariously in her high heels, red lipstick smeared all over her grinning face. That grin quickly vanishes when Sharon slaps her soundly across her face.

It takes all of Raven’s self-control not to strike back. It’s not that she doesn’t want to—grown-ups have been hurting her all her life, and all it takes really was to become something stronger and meaner than Sharon to ensure she never does that to her ever again. She’s done it before. She can do it again. But just at that moment Charles walks in, looking so stricken it’s as if he’s the one Sharon has hit.

And there’s just one thought in Raven’s mind— _I can’t leave him._

So Raven says nothing when Sharon pulls her roughly, tripping out of the precious heels. “Look at what you’ve done! Look at what you’ve done!” the woman is screaming as she grips Raven’s arm and shakes her. “You impertinent child!”

“Stop it! Stop it!” Charles is suddenly in between them, so small in his blue striped pajamas. “Mother, stop it! You’re hurting her!”

Sharon hits Charles, too. When his mother is in a rage, she is an unstoppable force of nature, and Raven is afraid. Suddenly Raven is crying, tears streaking through the ridiculous red lipstick on her face. The boy looks mutinous, raising one hand to his temple but Raven snatches it away and shakes her head.

“Get out of my room! Both of you!” Without saying anything more, Raven grabs Charles’ hand and they run. They run and run, mindlessly, as if Sharon is chasing them.

Even without his powers, they both instinctively turn to their secret hiding place in one of the rooms of the mansion. It’s a fort made of bedsheets and pillows, and the moment they rush in and close the world around them, Raven feels safe.

They sit in the darkness before Charles finds the flashlight he’s hidden somewhere. He flickers it on, and she sees the ugly red welt on his face. Charles is breathing heavily, and he still has that look on his face she saw in Sharon’s room. It’s a little bit scary.

“Are you okay?” Raven asks in a small voice.

It’s only when she speaks when Charles snaps out of it. He shakes his head and pats her had reassuringly. “I’ll be alright,” he says in that chipper voices of his when things are assuredly aren’t alright. Then, in a more somber voice, he adds, “I’m sorry she hit you, Raven.”

“It doesn’t even hurt anymore,” Raven says, and it’s true. Returning to her blue form always makes things better. Charles smiles at that, and reaches up to wipe the offending lipstick from her face with a tea towel he’s procured out of nowhere. “I’m sorry I got us into trouble,” she says.

“No,” he shakes his head empathically. “You didn’t do anything wrong, Raven. She shouldn’t have hit you.”

If Charles read her mind now, he’d find out that this isn’t the first time Sharon’s hurt Raven. This is just the first time he’s seen it, but Sharon pinches Raven, tells her that she is ugly, sometimes. Adults have done worse, Raven keeps telling herself. She can’t leave Charles when she’s had worse.

They sit in silence for a little while until Raven ventures: “Maybe you shouldn’t have…changed her mind, Charles.”

Those bright blue eyes grow shuttered and closed when she reminds him of what he did. It seemed fun to do at that time, having to convince Sharon and everyone else that she’s their foster child, that this is what Sharon’s always wanted. But no matter how careful and clever Charles has been, Raven sees that the woman’s mind rebels against it, that it’s in her instinct to reject Raven, no matter how hard she tries.

It hurts a little, but it’s not Sharon that Raven needs, anyway.

“I had to, Raven,” Charles finally says. He sounds a little apologetic, but he doesn’t seem regretful. “I told you I’d take care of you…” he sniffs. “I’ll do better next time.”

She wants to ask Charles why Sharon hates her so much. She wants to know why people recoil from what she truly is. It’s only skin, so why? But Charles doesn’t know why Sharon hits her and why Sharon hates her.

He puts a hand around her shoulder and she settles next to him.  _Charles is here,_ she thinks. And that’s enough.

—-

She’s fifteen years old and it feels like the world suddenly opens up to her.

Shops are beginning to reopen, rationing is ending, and Charles wants to take her shopping every other day. She gets scarves in every color, dresses with belts and ribbons and varying hemlines. He buys every hat that she casually tries on, every lipstick that grazes her mouth, and all the shoes she glances at. Charles doesn’t even look at the price tags and empties his wallet every time.

It’s not that Raven has been deprived the whole time she’s stayed with Charles—far from it. But he recklessly spends money as if there’s no end to it. Knowing the Xavier fortune, there probably isn’t, but that’s not the point.

She finally speaks up when Charles comes home with a glittering diamond necklace, not unlike the ones she’s seen on women when Sharon threw her society parties.

“What?” Charles is grinning in that twinkling way of his when he meets her disbelieving eyes.

She gapes at him. “This is just too much, Charles! I’m going to high school, not an ambassador’s ball!”

“The high school is all the poorer for it,” he returns flippantly as he makes himself at home, flipping through a magazine and spreading himself out on a sofa. Raven gazes down at the necklace, and it really is quite beautiful, but that is not the point.

“I can probably buy the whole high school with this,” she says, shaking her head. “Take it back, Charles.”

Charles looks really surprised this time, and halts through his reading. “Are you serious?” he says in a tone as if she’s the one being unreasonable.

“I don’t even know why you got me this,” she says, although she has a feeling she knows why. Sharon’s death earlier this year hit the household in a silent devastation that Raven’s not quite sure how to recover from. Whatever her treatment of Raven, Sharon was still Charles’ mother and she had quite suddenly left him the sole inheritor of their fortune coldly and quietly; without any final words.

But she doesn’t want to hurt Charles, so she says instead: “You don’t have to feel guilty leaving me behind,” she says. “High school’s not going to be the same without you, but I’m sure the World Languages Club will somehow find a way to carry on.” She’s joking but as she says this, she suddenly has an empty feeling in her stomach—something like hunger, like loss. She can’t imagine her every day without him, helping each other with their studies, struggling over their Vietnamese accent as they learned the language. He’ll be in a whole new world, learning exciting new things without her.

He sits up, and this time he’s the one with the confused expression. “You think I’m feeling guilty? Is that it?”

Now she’s the confused one. “Then…what are you…?”

Charles laughs. “Don’t you know a good-old fashioned bribe when you see one?”

He holds out a hand and asks her to come to Britain with him. She says yes, of course, but on one condition: That he return the diamond necklace. She’s fifteen years old for god’s sake, not some old fart’s mistress. Charles laughs heartily at that.

He complies and comes back from Tiffany’s with something less gaudy: A silver necklace, with a heart-shaped locket.

(She puts his picture in it and wears it on special occasions.)

—-

She’s seventeen years old and nobody wants to dance with her.

All throughout the evening she sits at a corner in her expensive dress, drinking cup after cup of punch. A few girls come by and say hello, but all the boys stay away. Raven shuts her eyes and tries to fight a burgeoning headache. She fights the impulse to flee to the lavatory to check her appearance, see what it is that’s keeping them away. But she knows she looks perfect, with her blonde curls and pink lips, betraying nothing of what lay underneath.

The clock strikes ten and Raven slips away; not that anybody notices.

Of course Charles is already waiting for her outside by the car, cardigan unbuttoned, that twinkling grin on his face. The smile drops when she comes nearer, sees the disappointment so clearly on her face. He presses his lips together and opens the door for her.

They drive without speaking, but he doesn’t drive her home. Instead they go to one of his favourite pubs and gets her a cola and some pie. He gets a beer for himself and they sit in a corner quietly, not exchanging a word since he picked her up. She feels a little ridiculous in her fancy dress, but she’s with Charles so it’s not so bad.

“I should’ve gone with you,” Charles finally says, as if it’s his fault this night’s gone south.

“Why? It’s not your fault I don’t know how to talk to people,” Raven says, as she watches Charles watch people.

“Why is that, you think?” Charles asks. He doesn’t mean anything by it; he is just genuinely curious. Raven almost laughs. Charles thinks his well-rehearsed lines are akin to actually relating to people, and it’s funny and a little sad.

“I don’t know. I just feel like a spy, sometimes you know? Like I’m just waiting to be found out,” Raven admits, tapping her fork against her plate. “And when I’m found out, it’s trouble.” She hopes he doesn’t remember that she actually had friends in America; friends she had to leave behind to follow Charles.

He reaches out and covers her hand with his. “You’re not trouble, Raven.”

She thinks about all the time Sharon’s been angry with her—and Charles, by extension—and disagrees silently. So she says instead, “I just wish someone danced with me at least once.”

Charles does a shrugging motion. “We can dance here,” he says.

Raven laughs in disbelief. “What?”

“Come on,” he’s standing up and offering her a hand. “Come on, let’s go,” he says, as if he’s about to set off running.

“You’re crazy! And you’re going to get beat up if you dance in a pub,” she says, trying to be the logical one for once.

He rolls his eyes and pulls her up. “Come on then,” he says, and they don’t really dance. He just sort of puts his hands around her and pulls her close, cheek to cheek. They rotate around slowly to some undefined music. He smells like beer and smoke and books as she nestles her chin into his shoulder.

Charles is a terrible dancer, and he steps on her toes—but it makes up for the evening, somehow.

—-

She’s twenty years old and her nightmares still terrify her.

It’s always the same one—she is six years old and her mother is screaming at the sight of her. Her mother sometimes becomes Sharon, and that’s when the nightmare becomes violent, Sharon kicking and swearing, yanking her hair and hissing invectives at her.  Raven is dimly aware of her brothers looking on, doing nothing to save her. She wants to yell for Charles, but her throat is sealed shut, denying her safety.

She wakes up and there are tears on her cheeks.

Charles is sleeping soundly in his bed, a textbook tucked under his arm when she comes crawling in next to him. He startles when she shifts to her blue form, but he automatically puts his arms around her.

“Raven?” his voice is thick with sleep. “Everything all right?”

She nods. “Just a bad dream,” she says. Charles looks concerned, but sleep overwhelms him after a little while. They used to talk about the dreams, and once Charles actually offered to help wipe them from her memory, but she didn’t want to. She still doesn’t understand why she didn’t want to.

She listens to Charles’ even breathing, studies his sleeping face. His dark lashes form crescent swoops, his pink mouth slightly ajar and drooling. Raven giggles and brushes a lock of hair away. How handsome Charles is, she thinks. And even more when he’s flashing those gorgeous blue eyes, when he’s thought of a brilliant idea, or when he thinks he’s being funny.

She’s not supposed to think of him that way, but she’s asked him not to read her mind for a reason.

Raven closes her eyes and tries to sleep, and hopes the nightmares don’t visit her again.  _This is my life now,_ she thinks, to comfort herself. That life in her nightmares is gone, long gone. This is her life now, hers and Charles, and she is happy. She’ll do everything to make sure this is not taken from her again.  

With that in mind, Raven falls asleep, Charles holding her close.

—-

She’s twenty-five years old and people think she’s wasting her life away.

The waitresses she works with all have pipe dreams of their own—traveling around the world, modelling, acting, marrying someone nice. All she has is her heart-shaped locket and a slip of paper with Charles’ class schedule in her pocket.

“Come on, Raven,” Lisa, one of the aspiring actresses, say to her as they’re taking a cigarette break. “Why don’t you come to the auditions with me, gorgeous girl? You’re not doing anything after your shift, are you?”

Raven laughs nervously. “Charles is coming home after my shift and I haven’t cooked dinner yet.”

Gigi, another waitress, rolls her eyes at the statement. “Is he your brother or is he your husband? Can’t he just have dinner at the pub?”

Raven shakes her head more emphatically. Just the thought of that is mildly horrifying for her. “I just can’t, Lisa, I’m sorry.”

Lisa shrugs. “Your loss.”

Later that night, Raven walks home with those words ringing in her head.  _Is he your brother or is he your husband?_ She has to admit that she doesn’t know the answer to that herself.

In the middle of making dinner—Raven stops midway, strides to a full-length mirror, and transforms into a stereotypical housewife, with perfectly coiffed hair and a trim waist. “Oh hello, darling,” she puts on a big smile. “Welcome home.”

Somehow this image is hilarious and Raven laughs and laughs. She wishes Charles was here to see it. The pasta ends up overcooked because of this, but it doesn’t matter because Charles comes home late from university and goes straight to bed, without even bothering to change out of his clothes, without saying a word to her.

Raven sits by the cold dinner and tries not to be angry. She goes to Charles’ room and wants to wake him up and yell at him.  _I could’ve gone to an audition,_ she wants to say. Not that it means anything. But she sees his tired form and with a sigh, she leans over and takes his shoes off, instead.

She brushes his hair off his head and whispers, “Charles.”

But he doesn’t hear her.

—-

She’s twenty-seven years old, and she gets her photo taken.

Charles is wary at first, this whole modelling thing, but it’s not modelling, not really. His name is Henry and she met him while waitressing.

“It’s nothing irregular, I swear,” she insists as she anxiously shows Charles his portfolio. “He’s putting a portfolio together for his thesis and he asked me to model, and since I’m not doing anything other than waitressing…”

Charles is frowning deeply. “A portfolio for his thesis…” he murmurs thoughtfully. He sees Raven’s hopeful expression, and relents. “As long as you keep close to home, and you don’t stay out too late, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that,” he finally says.

Raven squeals and hugs Charles. “Thank you, Charles, really.”

To be perfectly honest, it’s not completely innocent. Henry is bespectacled and affable, enthusiastic about life, and found everything interesting and worthy to be photographed. He did not even speak to Raven to hit on her; he genuinely thought that she would be a good subject. She thought about all her beautiful dresses rotting away in her cabinet and agreed. It was only after she agreed that Henry gave himself away by blushing profusely.

Henry picks her up from the townhouse and Charles sees her off with a wave and a kiss. For the first time in her life, Raven is excited to be away from him.

They go to the countryside and talk about everything and nothing. They talk about her accent, her time in America, Charles. He talks to her about photographers he admires, his parents, and his plans after school. He’s so full of plans and ideas and things to do, that Raven suddenly feels wistful. It’s been a while since she’s had this kind of conversation with Charles.

Henry finally settles on stopping at a small pub, and while they’re having drinks, he takes a picture of her smiling.

Raven laughs. “We go all the way out here and you take a picture of me in a pub,” she says.

Henry shrugs. “It was a nice smile,” he says by way of explanation. He takes pictures of her for the rest of the day, walking, laughing, talking. They catch the sunset in a field of lavender and as Henry takes his last shot, Raven leans in and kisses him. He kisses her back, deeply.

She thinks about Charles, waiting at home.

Raven pulls away. “No,” she breathes, and Henry is blinking at her dazedly, lips bruised from hers. His dark hair is sticking up in funny ways and she feels slightly triumphant.  _I did that,_ she thinks, but she doesn’t want to do it again. “I’m sorry, Henry.”

He’s already shaking his head, not taking it her guilt. “No, I shouldn’t have…”

The day ends awkwardly and they don’t talk on the way back home. They shake hands, and that’s that.

She walks in on Charles walking up the steps to his room with a brunette in tow. “Oh, you’re back!” he calls down from his vantage point. If he’s embarrassed to be caught with someone, it doesn’t show. “How was it, then?”

Raven has never felt so small as that moment, her hair limp and her arms heavy with the clothes she used for the photos. The brunette pretends she’s not there. “It went fine. I’ll be going out again, soon. Dinner.”

He’s relieved she’s already made an excuse to give him time alone with the brunette. “You do that. We’ll talk later, yes?”

She forces a smile on her face. “Yes.”

A week later, Henry leaves a framed photograph of her smiling in the pub. Raven thinks about giving it to Charles, but dreads finding out where it will end up (in a drawer? hidden under his bed when he has a girl over?) and decides against it. She ends up putting it somewhere neutral, on a shelf, next to Charles’ older university books. 

Charles never notices it.

—-

Raven is twenty-eight years old and everything changes.

Erik is the most fascinating creature she and Charles have ever met, and he knows it. Erik makes Charles think that they’re in on this together, but says and does things differently when Charles isn’t looking. Raven is strangely repulsed and attracted by this. She has never met a person Charles can’t quite read as accurately as he should have.

Erik doesn’t stop looking at her. Erik can’t seem to help himself from looking at her, talking to her, appearing in unlikely places just to strike up conversation. It feels like power, a man’s attention, and Raven is not sure if she wants to deflect it. But the more Erik looks at her, the more Charles doesn’t. Erik is defined and sharp-edged where Charles is all soft edges and shades of gray. She doesn’t know what she wants more. Charles, who is already distracted by computers and the endless possibilities of different strains of mutation, of what it means for mankind.

_I’m the first of many,_ Raven thinks to herself. Not just for Charles, but for her as well. She’s not alone. And that’s a revelation to her, too.

It’s fun at first, like a throwing a special party for freaks, but then Darwin dies and everything changes.

She thinks about all the people like her, people who are scared and alone before Charles took her in, and she curses herself for her blindness. It’s not a nightmare for people like her; it’s a reality and a great many can’t escape it the way she did. Charles can’t possibly understand—for all the things he did for her, Charles can’t possibly understand, and it breaks her heart.

On that day at the beach, she looks at all the people Charles has now—Moira, Hank, Sean, Alex—and it’s more than she’s hoped for. She doesn’t want to leave him there, broken and in pain, but she knows that if she doesn’t go now, she’ll never be able to leave.

“You should go with him,” Charles says. “It’s what you want.”

She thinks about the nights waiting for him, always waiting for him, for his love, for his attention, for his smile. It’s been enough for the longest time, but now, so suddenly, it is not. She can’t wait anymore, when there are things to be done out there.

_I’m scared, Charles,_ she thinks, but Charles says nothing, merely gazes up to her with those bright blue eyes that she loves.

She kisses his forehead, says goodbye.

—-

Charles is thirty-nine years old and he’s in an art show, of all places.

It’s Hank’s idea, of course—Hank who still likes to pretend that everything is still normal, that for some reason Charles should still make an effort to be a productive member of society. Exercise! Society! Healthy food! What a notion. But today Hank had actually been overbearing enough to convince him for some culture, and the exhibit he proposed actually caught his attention.

 It’s a gallery opening, and the photographer is Henry Thorpe, who is still as bespectacled and smarmy-looking as when Charles last saw him. He is shaking hands with some artist types, and Charles is grateful for the silence in his mind, if to at least shield him from the banality of the evening. Hank has wandered off somewhere, and Charles is in half a mind to get the drinking started when stills his steps.

It’s a photograph of Raven, during that year she had a notion to become a model. In the photograph she is sitting somewhere outdoors, wearing one of the dresses he bought her long ago. She’s smiling and holding up a locket to the camera, and it’s open, and he recognizes his own photograph in it.

“A photograph within a photograph,” Henry Thorpe suddenly appears behind him. “It seemed like a novel idea at the time,” Charles merely squints at him. “Mr. Xavier? I don’t think you remember me, I’m…”

“Henry, yes I do remember,” Charles says. “One of your photographs is still in my house.”

Henry beams at this. He seems like one of those people who soak up any kind of positive reinforcement, however vague. “How is Raven?”

Charles considers lying; it’s not any of this Henry person’s business, anyway. But the truth slips out, anyway: “I don’t know,” he grins bitterly. “She left a long time ago.”

Henry puts on a somber face for his sake. “I hope she’s alright!”

“I know she is,” Charles says. He wants a drink so very, very badly. “When she’s around is the only time when anything is alright. I’ve learned that quite late in the game, I’m afraid.”

Henry doesn’t know what to say to that, so he makes an embarrassed excuse and slips away. Charles doesn’t even notice, contents himself with looking at her photograph. That locket. He’s searched high and low for it, but couldn’t find it. All of Raven’s things, she left behind—the clothes and the shoes and the makeup—but that necklace was nowhere to be found.

He searches her face in the picture, as if he is going to find a meaning to it. But she is smiling the smile of one who’s revealed a happy secret—the man in the locket, she’s smiling as if to say, look at this, my darling little secret.  

Henry is making his way back to him, and Charles turns on his heel to leave. Hank could follow later. He doesn’t notice the blonde woman that intercepts Henry, doesn’t observe Henry’s cry of pleasant surprise as he leans over to kiss the cheeks of his long-lost muse.

—-

Sometimes, Charles sits in the kitchen and wishes she would come back.

They say that insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results. But maybe if he keeps coming back here, where it began and where he had unknowingly ended it, maybe he’d have a shot at another chance. Charles doesn’t know why he thinks that, but he just does.

He tries to think of the faces of other women, even Erik, to try and give a name to his loss, but only Raven’s face remains.

He wonders who keeps her safe from her nightmares.

He wonders if she still cooks pasta the way she used to for him.

He wonders if she has the locket, and if she opens it to look at his picture.

He wonders if she thinks of him at all. 


End file.
